Trudeau Follows the Money

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

 

Justin Trudeau may be the best thing to happen to crypto since Satoshi Nakamoto.

 

With a considerable share of U.S.–Canada trade on pause and much of daily life disrupted across Canada’s cities, Prime Minister Trudeau has invoked, for the first time in his country’s history, Emergency Measures Act powers to shut down a domestic political protest, the so-called Freedom Convoy movement that began with complaints about the imposition of vaccine mandates on Canadian truckers reentering Canadian territory from the United States, and that has since become associated with, as these things now do, a long litany of complaints concerning everything from ordinary political business to QAnon nonsense and other exotic imports from south of the border.

 

In this so-called emergency, Trudeau is not sending in the troops. He is cutting off the money.

 

Trudeau, sounding a little like the old southern segregationists who complained about “outside agitators,” insists that the protests have been driven by “social media and illicit funding” rather than by genuine disapproval of his government’s policies. And so he is using the Emergency Measures Act to invest himself with the unilateral power to freeze bank accounts and cancel insurance policies, without so much as a court order and with essentially no recourse for those he targets. Canadian banks and financial-services companies will be ordered to disable clients suspected of being involved in the protests.

 

Trudeau says the protests are illegal. That is not quite right. The protests are not illegal per se, though some of the protesters certainly are breaking the law, for instance by blocking public roads and the like. The obvious parallel is the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Canada, which also included some law-breaking. Trudeau did not invoke Emergency Measures Act powers to suppress those protests, even though they brought together large crowds during a particularly dangerous phase of the Covid-19 epidemic contrary to the advice of Trudeau’s government — and the advice out of his own mouth, for that matter. Far from shutting down those protests, Trudeau actually participated in them, making a pious spectacle out of himself.

 

In leaning on the sensitive pressure point of financial services, Trudeau is following the example of Democrats in the United States, who have used strategies ranging from securities investigations to insurance regulation to punish political enemies ranging from the National Rifle Association to oil companies. Using financial regulation to crush freedom of speech isn’t financial regulation — it is crushing freedom of speech by abusing the powers of a government office.

 

This kind of thing is not exactly new — in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt used emergency powers to seize all gold in private hands in the United States in order to fortify the Federal Reserve — but technological changes have made such schemes more insidious. Paper money can be stuffed into mattresses, and coins can be buried in coffee cans. But when money is electronic and the information architecture enabling most financial transactions is heavily regulated and easily subjected to invasive surveillance, then financial regulators enjoy powers that no FDR — or Napoleon, or Lenin — ever dreamt of possessing. The opportunities for mischief are serious and worrisome — and so are the opportunities for tyranny.

 

Activists who have tried to use politicized financial regulation to undermine the Second Amendment, to take one example, never seem to think about how the same tactics could be used against the First Amendment: The New York Times may enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights, but without access to banking and commerce, that constitutional right cannot be effectively acted upon, and, hence, may as well not exist as a practical matter. Try running a newspaper or a political party with no bank account.

 

I myself do not particularly sympathize with the aims or the tactics of the protesters in Canada. I don’t care much for unruly mobs of any persuasion. But even so, it is impossible not to see the plain fact that these protesters are being targeted not for their practical effect or their tactics but for their beliefs and for the sort of people they are, that an obvious double standard is at play, and that this is deeply illiberal. A politically neutral police effort to open the roads and protect the rights of property and travel would be one thing, but this is the opposite: far from politically neutral, and intended to narrow social life and political discourse rather than to keep them open. When the laws are enforced exclusively (or with extra vigor) against political enemies, that is not law enforcement — that is political repression.

 

And it is political repression even in instances in which the content of the law itself is unobjectionable — for example, there is a difference between reviewing the paperwork of tax-exempt groups and reviewing the paperwork of tax-exempt groups that you consider political enemies and hope to harm. Permitting protests you endorse and shutting down those that are critical of your government — and that is precisely what Trudeau is trying to do — is illegitimate.

 

In our time, we don’t burn forbidden books — Amazon just makes politically nonconformist works disappear. We don’t lock people up for having the wrong political beliefs — but we do make sure they cannot earn a living, go to school, or raise their children in peace. And we don’t have to send men with jackboots and billy clubs to break up protests — we have very polite Canadian bankers to do that for us.

 

It can be no surprise, then, that people are looking for digital platforms that protect their anonymity and keep their communications slightly beyond the reach of the long arm of the state. People who do not expect to be treated fairly and who have no confidence that their rights (or even their interests) will be taken into consideration are forced to improvise. And it’s even less surprising that cryptocurrencies and other escape routes from the banking system increasingly appeal to people who are neither cartel bosses nor international men of mystery. In a world in which unpopular political views can cut an individual or an organization off from the financial main stream, such innovations are necessities.

 

When people cannot trust their governments to protect their liberties, they will seek protection elsewhere. That imposes real costs on a society. Canadians should think twice about whether they wish to pay those costs for the sake of Mr. Trudeau’s prejudice and ease.